Identifier: greatpicturesassx00sing (find matches)
Title: Great pictures, as seen and described by famous writers
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930, ed. and tr
Subjects: Painting
Publisher: New York : Dodd, Mead and Company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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which, for want of a happier term, we call dramatic.Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, orhad withdrawn her more intimate manifestations to awaitlikelier times, is a question it were long to answer. Thesubjects, at any rate, were such as the Greeks, with theirsurer instincts and saving grace of sanity in matters of thiskind, either forbore to meddle with or treated as decora-tively as they treated acanthus-wreaths. To-day we callthem effective subjects; we find they produce shocksand tremors; we think it braces us to shudder, and wethink that Art is a kind of emotional pill; we measure itquantitatively, and say that we know what we like.And doubtless there is something piquant in the quiveringproduced, for example, by the sight of white innocencefluttering helpless in a grey shadow of lust. So long asthe Bible remained a god that piquancy was found in aMassacre of the Innocents; in our own time we find it in aFaust and Gretchen^ in the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal
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Judith. Botticelli JUDITH 8l Academy. It was a like appreciation of the certain effectof vivid contrasts as powerful didactic agents (coupled with,or drowning, a something purer and more devout) whichhad inspired those most beautiful and distinctive of all thesymbols of Catholicism, the Adoration of the Kings, theChrist-child cycle, and which raised the Holy Child andMaid-Mother to their place above the mystic tapers and theCross. Naturally the Old Testament, that garner of grimtales, proved a sick wine : David and Golias, Susanna andthe Elders, the Sacrifice of Isaac, Jethros Daughter. Butthe story of Judith did not come to be painted in Tuscansanctuaries until Donatello of Florence had first cast herin bronze at the prayer of Cosimo pater patriae. Her entrywas dramatic enough at least: Dame Fortune may wellhave sniggered as she spun round the city on her ball.Cosimo the patriot and his splendid grandson were no soonerdead and their brood sent flying, than Donatellos Judithwas set up

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